The Dutch publisher that published a book that would reveal the alleged traitor to Anne Frank announced on Tuesday (22) that it will withdraw the work, under pressure from historians and experts who claim that the conclusion of the six-year investigations led by a former – FBI agent is dubious.
The book “Who Betrayed Anne Frank”, published in January, had worldwide repercussion by pointing out a new hypothesis about the circumstances of Anne Frank’s arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, in which she died. According to Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, the traitor to the Frank family would be the Jew Arnold van der Bergh.
The charges against the man, who died in 1950, were based on evidence such as an anonymous letter sent to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, after World War II.
After the book’s publication, however, Jewish groups, historians and independent researchers rejected the outcome Sullivan found.
In February, a collective that brings together the main Jewish communities in Europe asked the American publisher Harper Collins to suspend the English edition of the work (“The Betrayal of Anne Frank”), alleging that the book had tarnished the memory of Anne Frank and the dignity of Holocaust survivors.
Also on Tuesday, a report by historians specializing in World War II and released in the Netherlands pointed out that the investigations published by Sullivan did not follow a professional standard.
“[A conclusão] is, without exception, very weak and sometimes based on an evidently misreading of the sources”, the team reported, adding that the content of the work “has not been subjected to critical evaluation in any way”.
The experts’ outcome was the trigger for the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos. “Based on the findings of this report, we have decided that, effective immediately, the book will no longer be available,” it said in a statement.
The company also said it will ask bookstores to return stock of the work. At the end of January, the publisher had decided to suspend the printing of new copies, due to doubts about the evidence supporting the hypothesis.
In addition to pinpointing Anne Frank’s traitor, the book details how the Nazis would have found the place where the teenager and her family were hiding – a secret room in an Amsterdam warehouse.
She and seven other Jews were arrested on August 4, 1944. All were taken to concentration camps and Anne died at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany.
Her father published his diary in 1947, which has sold over 30 million copies, has been translated into 60 languages ​​and captured the imagination of millions of readers around the world.
